I wrote Fat Girl because I'd read books that other fat women wrote about how they were fat. Most fat women didn't write the truth about fat. They didn't write about fat fat fat fat thighs and how tender flesh on the inside of fat thighs rubs and rubs…

They'd cluck-cluck-cluck that you were fat because in one sitting you poked in your snout and gobbled, with warm garlic French bread: an entire four-serving bowl of the perfect Cobb salad: Romaine and Bibb lettuces, Haas avocado whose soft ripe flesh turns an immeasurably buttery green, watercress, tomato, cold chicken breast and ham cut into batons, hard-boiled egg, chives, crumbled Maytag blue cheese, bacon fried and broken up, and for dressing, a heavy sluice of whatever you like).

Fate is cruel. I think we can all agree on this one thing before I move on. Mostly cruel. Especially when one considers withering illnesses, rapid aging, death and taxes — all of which are as unavoidable as Fate, and so are therefore part of Fate.

At this exact moment I, a writer and a mother of a certain age (one son, Pablo, six) am sitting on a barstool at the Genius Bar at my local Mac Store. (The Genius Bar. I wonder how much money someone made to think of that, instead of Customer Service. I'm thinking about a million dollars and a team of six creatives, two of whom were actively disengaged.)

Piling a full tub of dishes on top of another full tub, Willy lumbers across the wet tile floor calling "corner" as he rounds blind walls. He's hoping to dump the dirty dishes he carries in time to polish silverware. Then he can clear the next table of egg and chunks of chewed sausage. He ignores the ache in his back, masked by the elastic brace around his waist. He pretends not to feel stiffness in his knees. If he sets the next two tables fast enough, he'll make it to the walk-in refrigerator at the back of the restaurant and return with ten one-gallon jugs of orange juice before any of the waiters have a chance to ask him to check the bathroom because one of the toilets backs up and spews water out into the hall, leaving the carpet smelling like a wet sponge.

Drive the 5 from downtown and — boom! — just overhead, an aircraft with a bloated belly screams. Wheels down, tilting for landing, 50 yards between plane and road. Or how about having to yell on cell phones in Golden Hill, then pausing as jet engines roar past? That roughly sums up the essence of the San Diego airport: it's our downtown airport, not an abstract method of arrival or escape tucked away in the outskirts.

I ask to hear the tape made on that day, the 43-minute one in which Jones leads his followers into drinking the cyanide-laced drink. Stephenson invites me to sit at a small table where there is displayed the image used on the tape made by the People's Temple Gospel Choir. The tape, He's Able, borrows its title from an old gospel song and refers to divine intervention. Here, however, "he" is a reference to Jim Jones. Stephenson inserts the audiotape in the boombox and fixes the volume. I listen for a few moments, then stop the tape.

As somebody who was always an angry person, it just got worse. I got acne, a lot of acne, all over 'cause [the steroids] were almost all oil-based. So I'd be breaking out on my shoulders. And I was extremely short tempered. Just like a maniac. And you know how it is when you're laying that weight down. You can get yourself just mad enough to lift it, even if you weren't strong enough. You'd just get mad enough to do it.